Month: January 2009

Sometimes we hear about how google searches are no longer any good and Microsoft likes to make it sound like their search is so great but every time I use Windows Live search I am disappointed and when the same search is run at google I generally find what I need on the first page. For instance this morning I wanted to resume a big download from MS that I had to suspend the other day. I figured there must be a way to launch the file transfer manager that Microsoft uses but there was nothing in my start menu. I typed the query “reopen microsoft file transfer manager” into IE (because that was open) and it used Live search and I was disappointed, nothing obviously relevant. So I turned to google (this time in firefox) and right near the top is a link which has the information I want and it is a page at Microsoft no less.

Hopefully Microsoft does not buy Yahoo, it also returned the same useful link near the top of the results, at least there is some competition for useful search results out there which likely be lost of MS bought Yahoo.

Microsoft can not even index their own web sites for useful searching, why would anyone expect them to index other sites usefully? And the unfortunate news this week out of CES is that MS has bought off Verizon and Dell so that Live search will be the default on their platforms, there are going to be a lot of disappointed users out there who don’t realize there are other choices easily available which do a much better job